Whewell’s Gazette the weekly #histSTM links list returns today, after a short break, with the first edition of its second year bringing you all the best that out editorial staff could sweep up of the histories of science, technology and medicine in the Internet over the last seven days. During that period many of our supporters and readers, who also supply much of the material collected here, were gathered together in Swansea for the annual conference of the BSHS discussing lots of interesting topics from the history of science. One central theme that is a principal interest of our long-suffering chief sub-editor was, how can science communicators use history of science?

Many of those present in Swansea are highly active on Twitter and tweeted this discussion in great detail. Katherine McAlpine, a curator, collected and storified those tweets and we present her efforts in place of an editorial for this edition.

“It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written. Only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead, they suggest that histories are concocted by error-prone human beings who patch together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.” – Keith Thomas h/t Sharon Howard

Quotes of the week:

“Your password must contain a ferrous metal, an embarrassing sexual memory, at least one Norse god and the seeds of its own destruction”. – @daniel_barker

Traditional Turkish Calendar (1452). This kind of calendar was based on a cycle of 12 months, each corresponding to a different animal. This calendar for the year of the monkey by Hamdi Mustafa b. Sunbul was presented to Mehmed II. Topkapi Palace Museum Library, MS B 309.